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You are most likely here because you enjoy crafting. I have been reading up on some of the WoW issues regarding gold making, which make me realize that WoW is not the game for me.

If you want to play a game where gathering and crafting is the cornerstone of the economy, and are not faint of heart, I recommend EVE Online. EVE even has releases purely to support industry. You can play for free if you are good enough manufacturer or trader.

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23 November 2011

Glyphs with no effort

At what price would you really consider the glyph market isn't worth it?

When not stirring up trouble, Critical Goblin has been playing 'hard' with glyphs. As the current champion of the deep undercut method, he is posting 25g glyphs.

Now we all 'know' that the manufacturing cost of a glyph is way less than that. Lets say we use whiptail at 35g / stack (I only work in stacks, but that's 1g75 each for those working with individual prices). Anything less than this, and you are selling your whiptail below average market price. (Yes I know that I could probably get cheaper whiptail - but then I could sell it as is, without transformation for the average price)

(pricing taken from theunderminejournal.com - 23 Nov 2011)

Lets price the resulting inks based on that whiptail, and call it 4.33g per Blackfallow, 9g per Inferno (probably overpricing inferno ink - but CG thinks that trinkets work best), so the most a glyph will cost is 4.33g *3 + 0.55 for parchment, or 13.54g.

So, if CG's costs are 13.54g, why isn't he (or his competition) selling all glyphs at 15g? Because glyph making is time consuming and boring as watching paint dry. Even CG thinks that his bottom wall should be 25g.

I am also time poor. I should be working on first life instead of collecting mail and writing this post.

For me - my preferred glyph market is horde side and my crafter is alliance side. While this is not insurmountable problem, it is an additional 'cost' in terms of time and effort.

However, let me shake up the mix. Imagine you had effortless glyphs that you could sell at 21g - or even 16g (well below CG's floor of 25g). I still need to post glyphs and collect mail - remaining a non trivial exercise but at least i get the 'ca-ching' of sold glyphs as a reward.

How do I remove the boring, time consuming part, and the effort of transferring stock across a sometimes hostile 'neutral' AH? By getting someone else to make the glyphs. Now, they will need payment (in gold or kind)- no one voluntarily does that much work for free. I have an idea of what I think those processes are worth.

Now regardless of whether I wish to participate in a 21g very deep undercut war, or picking up the occasional glyph sale at 200-400g, I can have a stock of glyphs that is no effort, removing 2 of the 4 headaches of glyph selling (milling, crafting; with posting and collecting mail remaining)

So, to answer Brent's question from my last post on this topic. Yes, given today's herb prices, I will pay 20g per glyph horde side, 15g alliance side.

15 comments:

Firstly i would sell at 15g under normal circumstances where i make/sell dm trinkets and use infernos properly. But for my War experiment, infernos are dumped/discarded to keep the experiment simple, rather than we all argue about BF to IF ratio which is different for everyone. So in my War series no inferno means BFs cost around 6 to 6.5g

Secondly, i love selling glyphs at a loss. Lets say if i could make glyphs for 13.5g. I would sell glyphs at 12.5g and therefore make a loss of 1g thereabouts. If i sell 300 glyphs i lose 300g which is peanuts. What I gain though is exasperated competitors.

If i told you for 300g i could kill off 10% of your most annoying competitor's interest in your market, is this not an attractive deal? The more times you do this (if the competitor does not improve himself) the more closer he gets to his Boiling Point (the point he says: stuff this, whateffs).

If i did this many times and it cost me 20k but i got rid of a competitor ... so what, 20k is easy money. Is convincing a competitor to quit as equally easy? Even a 100k is easily earnt these days.

BAM. CRITICAL STICKS TO WHAT HE KNOWS BEST AND ROCKS YOUR FOOFS WORLD!

I can drive people out of an industry without making a loss. Whether I choose to is a different issue.

Some people consider loss making industry a 'clever' thing. I do not. Loss leaders are either cross subsidising (which you are not), or will eventually go out of business.

You are assuming that you are the most stubborn player with the deepest pockets. This is a big assumption.

If I was on your server, I would very comfortably post at my minimum profit, for months on end, providing you undercut me.

My listing even a token wall at 50s profit leaves you with a dilema. If you undercut, you work for peanuts. If you don't undercut you leave me in the market.

For the record, I have started with 20g glyphs on my alliance server. Last night I posted a couple of hundred. This morning I posted 6 glyphs. I will leave those prices up for 3 days then ratchet it down even further.

I honestly don't understand posting at a loss, especially glyphs. I'll just buy all your glyphs out if they are under cost, saves me time, and leaves you spending hours a day keeping up stock. How do you win there?

I agree with Foo…..there is no need to sell at a loss and like Foo says, Cricial assumes too easily that you will always be around longer than the others. And I really don’t believe anyone can scare people who have been actively posting for years. I had someone on my server trying to do the critical goblin method. They are already gone. My glyph sales are back to an average sale price of 110g each.( I only actively sell say 50-60% of the total glyphs that can be sold). The research glyphs have a market of 3-4 sellers and the non research glyphs have a market of 5-10 people with only 4 or 5 regulars. Only one is an aggressive undercutter. The rest play the coop game and let the prices rise.

I don’t leave a market I just fade into the background. In fact I helped crash the glyph market to a price of 10-15g a glyph. I crash the price not to sell but to make others undercut me and pull mine. I force the aggressive people to have little in the way of profit. All it takes is to know when they are on and crash the price. You learn where there postings are. In fact one would undercut below 10g. After 6 weeks of this they left.

The thrust of how I play is more on dealing with timing the market. And what part of the market I am in. I can time my postings to be lowest price for most of the 8-10pm market and for the sales after midnight. I will also find those that like to camp and help them crash the market. They blindly follow. I then leave that part of the glyph market. My aim is never to sell all glyphs but to sell those glyphs that sell regularly and for a decent profit. I post on one toon and will only ever buy out a glyph if it is a research glyph priced below 20g with only 1 or 2 posted. I really now try not to buy glyphs out unless I am able to get the price back up to 250g. It is pointless to move the price up on non research glyphs as the price comes down fairly quickly. Activity level on my server is such that sales have slowed a lot lately but the number of sellers has also declined.

One additional comment as to what is the mean/average price. In the manner in which data is gathered on a site like undermine journal the frequency of the data collection means the higher priced items will always appear where as the lower price goods will quite often never be caught. The mean and average prices on the site are skewed to the high side. By how much who knows. On my server the average price of whiptail is 32 gold. I can go to the AH and buy a stack of whiptail any day and pay less than 28g a stack. Today I can buy 113 stacks at 25g. Sure lots are higher but there is no need to ever pay the average price. Quite often I can pay 20g a stack. I do not agree that the average price on an item like this is the actual average/mean selling price as it includes the items that don’t sell and excludes the items priced low that sell as soon as they are posted. If I look at an item like elementium ore…..I see the results are even greater as the volume of ore is dramatically higher than the volume of herbs on my server. The data is skewed based upon how it is collected and in many cases I just don’t see the sales occur at these prices especially if they are a very highly posted item.

Ugh we have the same arguments every month, no wonder ppl think us glyphers are mad. Or is Critical incorrectly lumping everyone in with himself.

I cant believe i fell for the bait and comment, Foof you know me too well.

Brent, against a Critical (thats you on your server) of course common by-the-books dont easily work. But at least the guy tried. Even though he failed, if he was a good failer he would try to figure out why and adapt accordingly and try again to beat you. Who do you respect more someone who keeps coming back or the quitter that quits quickly.

PS: what you describe is exactly the mindset of a Critical goblin, fullon pvp to attain and retain market share. How does it feel to be a Critical.

I think it just highlights that those that are determined dont give up after a couple of months. Same with one of the responses on your blog the other day. I really dont think strat matters as much as how long someone wants to be around.

a) You will never get rid of 1c undercutters until you kill the mods.b) You will never kill the mods because your method has no effect on them.c) Those of us who use the AH as a time-reducing alternative to farming are out to make adequate profit.d) Until you're significantly selling under cost, you won't drive the people you want to stop, out of the market. You will actually reduce the intelligent members of the economy first, and so be subject to more of what you hate.

I have a simple strategy:

1) Sell for 1c lower than the current sale price.2) Have 1-2 glyph of every type either on the AH or in my bags.3) Any glyph selling for more than 15g will be posted at 1c cheaper than the current AH price. Otherwise it sits in my bag.4) If there are no copies of the glyph on the AH, double the historical price to a maximum of 300g.

Using this method, I've made approximately 82,000 gold in a period of about 4 months. By some standards, that's slow. By anyone who considers themselves to be a 'significant player' in the AH, its definitely slow. To me, its a way of making sure that I don't have to pay for raiding consumables out of anything but profit, and I don't have to farm herbs for raiding potions etc.

That said, I'll be bowing out of the Glyph market for a little while, or at least until I see Foo has finished tilting at windmills.

Natural economy is too stupid to be played, so the only way you'll continue to suppress prices is by reducing your own profit and increasing the time you must spend to make that profit.

In whispers you said to me that you hate people coming in and 1c undercutting you. That's not a problem with the market, thats simply your inablility to be able to post glyphs at the time before most buyers are active, and most sellers have already posted. Its a small window which I call "The 30 minutes before I raid". Reducing the rest of the markets ability to make significant profit seems very... petty...

Caelestrasz is an almost dead server, so it doesn't have the throughput to make sufficient profit off edge margins, so essentially, you're killing the market simply because of the fact that you dislike other people undercutting you. You'll make your 1.5g per glyph, and either realise its not worth the effort, or the rest of us will find another market to repeat the process without your interference.

And Foo, I mean what I say. The fact that you're making me farm to support my main character's raiding means that I don't feel I have the time to tank for you on off nights, so I guess thats the trade-off you make.

I understand the blog is focused on the glyph market, but it is just a market that no longer makes enough money for me to make it worth the time.

I play for more time per day than most here and I still find that the shuffle is VASTLY superior time per profit. I can cut gems and make enchants in around 3-5 minutes and then make 3-5k per post cycle. Or I could spend tons of time reposting 500+ glyphs in hopes that people might buy a few glyphs before I get undercut.

I can also easily shuffle on my main because I don't have to have my entire bank and bags filled with glyphs and can actually use my bank for gear.

On a different note, I agree with Brent. All the talk of undercutting and driving competitors out is the stuff of old WoW.

If I saw you doing it, I'd pull out quickly. I'd be like "ok, take the terrible profit margins considering the time you invest... I could farm runecloth in winterspring and make more gold per hour lol". Then, when you raise the prices up, my scans will detect it within the hour, and I'll be back in the market just like that.

This isn't the real economy. There is no barrier to re-entry in WoW. The only people you will ever drive out of a market are the stupid or the lazy.

As a reference, compared to Brent's 82k, I started playing the AH for the very first time in my entire WoW playing time back in the second week of August. About 3 months and 2 weeks later, I've made a total of around 650k gold.

I just bought a Spectral Tiger for a friend and still have a bit of cash left over, and I did it spending less time than I would have if I tried to play with glyphs.

Tilting at windmills is an English idiom which means attacking imaginary enemies, or fighting unwinnable or futile battles.

@Brent #2 : The 'enemy' is not imaginary. The opposition is real and exists. The battle is not 'futile', or unwinnable; I fully expect that at the conclusion of the battle, the winner(s) will be earning an addtional 1k+ / day (profit - not sales) with posting just once/day.

Note: This can include you, even if you decide to temporarily suspend posting glyphs.

"The phrase is sometimes used to describe confrontations where adversaries are incorrectly perceived, or courses of action that are based on misinterpreted or misapplied heroic, romantic, or idealistic justifications."

Due to the blog mostly being inactive and the only comments recently being anonymous spam; I have restricted comments to "Registered Users"; hat includes anything google recognises as an account (google, openId, wordpress etc). I am still (mostly) active on foo-eve.blogspot.com

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Disagreements are welcome - especially on speculative posts. I love a great disagreement.